LABOUR-ASIA: ”We Want Fair Play,” Demand Workers

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Aug 9 2004 (IPS) - When they gather in Athens this week for the start of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, the athletes from over 190 countries will have no time for names like Chrek Sophea, an attractive 24- year-old Cambodian woman.

And neither will they have time, too, for Nor Nurun Nahar, from Bangladesh, or Sajida Farid, from Pakistan – also women in their twenties.

But these women have the games very much on their minds as they made clear on Sunday at a soccer field in the Thai capital. They were there, along with over 500 other women and men from eight Asian countries, to stage their own Olympics – one dedicated to workers.

However the spirit of competition that unfolded during a football game, which had a steady beat of drums, the clash of cymbals and loud cheers from the stands to add a festive air, had a pointed message for the world of sports.

That women like Sophea who make up the army of workers toiling to produce clothes for the athletes to wear are not going to take labour exploitation anymore.

In fact, the first ever ‘Workers Solidarity Olympics’ held in Asia was part of a global drive to tell the multi-billion dollar sportswear industry that sportswear and garment workers need a fairer set of rules in the factories that they work.

”We feel exploited because of the long hours we put in and what they pay us,” Sophea said before displaying her athletic skills on the field. ”The factory conditions are not good for our health.”

The factory she works at in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh is part of a supply chain feeding the sportswear industry. She is paid a piece-wage and labours, on average, for six days per week.

And her monthly salary of 50 U.S. dollars is double the amount 27-year-old Farid, from Pakistan, earns for her piece-wage labour, which is limited to stitching and cutting thread in a factory that producers sportswear.

By contrast, the global market for the sportswear industry, which includes names such as Nike, Reeboks, Adidas, Puma, Fila, ASICS, Lotto, Mizuno and Kappa, had a 58 billion U.S. dollars global market, states a report released by the ‘Play Fair At The Olympics Campaign.’

”We believe there is a strong disconnect between the rules of fair play at the Olympics and the reality of workers producing sportswear,” Tim Connor from Oxfam, one of the non governmental groups linked to the campaign, told IPS.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the sportswear sector have to respond to the flaws in labour conditions in factories in Asia and elsewhere, he added.

”The IOC should take a moral stand to apply pressure on factories producing sportswear,” he added.

The event in Bangkok is part of the estimated 500 activities held in 35 countries since March this year to expose the dark side of this summer’s games in the city it was born.

”We have got over 500,000 signatures to back out campaign to achieve new labour standards,” Ineke Zeldenrust, coordinator of the Amsterdam-based Clean Clothes Campaign, said in an interview.

”Almost 10 years after the anti-sweatshop campaign was launched we still have problems,” she added.

Most troubling among them is the lack of attention by a majority of the sportswear companies to improve the lot of the workers and protect their rights and the prevailing purchasing practises in the industry’s supply chain.

The new pressure being put on workers to produce sportswear at shorter intervals is reflected in the ‘Play Fair At The Olympics Campaign’ report.

”Adidas aims to reduce its lead-times for athletic apparel from 120 to 90 days,” states the report. ”On the factor floor, this is translating into excessive working hours and forced overtime in the rush to complete orders in time for exports.”

As a result of the millions of factory workers in the developing world pushed to such conditions, the report asserted that ”if labour exploitation were an Olympic sport, the sportswear giants would be well represented among the medal winners.”

Labour rights activists like Zeldenrust admit, though, that the major players in the industry – Nike, Reebok and Adidas – have accepted to maintain acceptable labour standards, or ”at least they are trying.”

Less headway, however, has been made with the second string of major sports companies, like Puma, ASICS, FILA, Umbro, Mizuno and Lotto, who are the main targets of the ‘Play Fair At The Olympics’ campaign.

This drive, in fact, has taken a page from a similar effort, to link labour rights to a major sporting event, during the 2002 Football World Cup held in Japan and Korea.

Then the focus was on the South Asian children aged 10 years or even younger forced to stitch footballs that often left their fingers scarred, with cuts and bruises and peeled skin.

The Global March Against Child Labour, a New Delhi-based child rights lobby, sought to end such a harsh form of child labour.

‘ ‘We need to raise our voices and tell the companies that we are being abused,” Neneng, a 21-year-old Indonesian woman, said while waiting her turn to play football with her co-sportswear workers from Sri Lanka, India, Philippines and Thailand.

She works in a factory where there is no ventilation and breathing is ”difficult.”

”The IOC and sportswear companies don’t pay attention to this,” said Sim Socheata, from the Phnom Penh-based Woman’s Agenda for Change. ”That is not fair play.”